much rarer as they have become
more fearful."

Now then, this national separate existence, that is, the hostile
shutting off of one nation from another, will vanish. Thus future
generations will be able to achieve without trouble tasks that gifted
heads have long conceived, and unsuccessfully attempted to accomplish.
Condorcet, among others, conceived the idea of an international
language. The late Ulysses S. Grant, ex-President of the United States,
uttered himself this wise on a public occasion: "Seeing that commerce,
education and the rapid exchange of thought and of goods by telegraphy
and steam have altered everything, I believe that God is preparing the
world to become one nation, to speak one language and to reach a state
of perfection in which armies and navies will no longer be needed." It
is natural that with a full-blooded Yankee the leading _role_ be played
by the "dear God," who, after all, is but the product of historic
development. Hypocrisy, or perhaps also ignorance in matters that
concern religion, is nowhere as stupendous as in the United States. The
less the power of the State presses upon the masses, all the more must
religion do the work. Hence the phenomenon that the bourgeoisie is most
pious wherever the power of the State is laxest. Next to the United
States, come England, Belgium and Switzerland in this matter. Even the
revolutionary Robespierre, who played with the heads of aristocrats and
priests as with nine-pin balls, was, as is known, very religious, whence
he ceremoniously introduced the "Supreme Being," which shortly before
had, with equal bad taste, been dethroned by the Convention. And seeing
that the frivolous and idle aristocrats of France had been greatly
bragging about their atheism, Robespierre regarded atheism as
aristocratic, and denounced it in his speech to the Convention on the
"Supreme Being" with these words: "Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of
a Supreme Being, that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes
triumphant crime, comes from the people. If there were no God, one would
have to be invented." The virtuous Robespierre had his misgivings
concerning the power of his virtuous republic to cancel the existing
social antagonisms, hence his belief in a Supreme Being that wreaks
vengeance and seeks to smooth the difficulties that the people of his
time were unable to smooth. Hence also was such a belief a necessity to
the first republic.

One step in progress will br